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“Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
“No,” Robby said, shoving a mouthful of chow mein into his mouth. “I’m a grown man who is taking initiative. Being an active agent in my own life. Exploring what makes me happy. You should be thrilled.”
Jack stared at him.
Robby met his eyes, forcing himself not to tilt his chin defiantly. “You’re the one who told me I need to get out more. Do things not related to the Pitt. Relax.”
Jack took a pointedly slow, measured breath, the rhythm painfully and patronizingly obvious.
“By which I meant you should, I don’t know, take up bowling. Join a gym. Get into birdwatching, You’re an emergency medicine professional. What’s next, you’re going to start leaving unsecured firearms around the apartment? Maybe buy your niece a trampoline?”
“We don’t have firearms in the house. It’d be hard for me to leave them unsecured.”
“Not the point, Michael,” Jack said. “But congratulations on reaching a level of deliberate oblivion and obstinacy that is genuinely impressive, even for you. Just checking — you are still an organ donor, right? Figured I should confirm your status, in case someone asks me later.”
“Jack,” Robby said, his voice pointedly neutral. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you are overreacting.”
Jack stared at him.
“Michael,” Jack said. “Let’s do a fun exercise, alright? Let’s imagine, for a moment, the roles were reversed. Pretend that I have had a real fuck of a few years, alright? Not inaccurate, actually. But let’s pretend that I, after going through a series of events which I am genuinely worried about outlining explicitly during this conversation, but you know damn well what I’m referring to — pretend that I then, having spent months not really sleeping. Not eating. Not showing interest in things I used to care about. Not having the energy to do anything I used to enjoy. Avoiding the people who care about me. Dodging my partner’s loving concern. And then, with all of that context, I came home one day and announced that I had purchased a fucking motorcycle. What would you think? Would you go ‘yeah, fair enough, that’s a reasonable hobby for a middle-aged man to take up out of nowhere’, or would you, maybe, just maybe, be more than a little bit concerned?”
“I don’t like what you’re implying,” Robby said.
“I don’t like implying it,” Jack said. He ran his hands through his hair, the trail of his fingers leaving little tufts behind, an archeological trail of frustration. “Just — promise me you’ll wear a fucking helmet.”
“I promise,” Robby said. “I’m not suicidal.”
Jack gave him a long, silent look, his mouth a tense line at the edges.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Jack said finally. “So I’m going to pretend to believe that.”
Robby wanted to reassure him, to reach for the words that he knew he had, to explain that Jack didn’t need to worry, nobody needed to worry, that this wasn’t a midlife crisis or a lack of attachment to his continued existence, that everything was always happening all the time, that sometimes walking into the Pitt felt like choking on something acrid burning in his chest, that his thoughts were always racing and people were always asking him things and he just wanted to escape, feel nothing in his chest but the rumble of asphalt and engine beneath him, the wind rushing in his ears and drowning out the alarms that hovered at the edges of his perception like hungry ghosts, and he was an eloquent goddamned man, he knew he was, but he couldn’t find the words. The layer of glass between him and the world, him and the man he wanted to be, him and the man everyone deserved — it was thick, leaded, double-glazed, institutional, a thin mesh of wires wrought through it to prevent it from shattering or being pierced with a bullet.
He opened his mouth anyway. Took a breath. Closed it. Poked at his chow mein instead.
Later that night, Robby sat on the couch, pretending to read, while Jack stared at the television. He wasn’t really watching it.
“I think I did that wrong,” Jack said, finally. He was still looking at the television, pretending to be engrossed in the painfully young, painfully straight, and painfully ill-matched couple on the screen deciding if they did, in fact, Love It Or Leave It. “I’m not done yelling at you, but I think I did it wrong. Why do you think it’s a good idea? What convinced you?”
“It isn’t —“ Robby stopped. It wasn’t, was the thing. Wasn’t whatever Jack was thinking.
“You keep saying that,” Jack said. “So tell me what it is, not what it isn’t. What’s the appeal?”
“I don’t know,” Robby said, shrugging. “Doesn’t matter. You don’t actually want to hear it, anyway.”
“No, I do,” Jack said. “Tell me.”
“Going fast is fun?” Robby said after a minute. “I like how it makes me feel?”
The words rung false, even to himself, which was frustrating, because they weren’t false, not in that way, not really, but he couldn’t — he sounded stupid, and that was the fuck of it, because he was’t stupid, he wasn’t the kind of man who failed to answer basic questions from his partner in front of HGTV re-runs. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t that.
“Do you?” Jack said. “Because that sounded like a question. Sure, let’s work with that. And how does it make you feel?”
“Don’t therapy-speak me.”
“How would you fucking know? Answer the question.”
Robby tried to answer properly. He really did. He was under no illusions that he was an easy man to live with, and he knew he hadn’t become any easier recently. Jack had been more patient than he deserved — objectively speaking — and he wasn’t even asking anything unreasonable.
This was the worst part of it, really. Robby was, objectively speaking, a smart man. Good with words. Quick on his feet. But it — the version of him that did that, that knew that, that knew what to say, knew all the answers, could rattle them off in a way that was charming and convincing and real — he was behind the leaded glass, the mesh wire distorting his face, and he wasn’t even being polite enough to pass Robby some goddamned speaking notes.
“I don’t know,” Robby said after a pause. “Alive, I guess?”
Jack nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Okay. Not as in, ‘I’m okay with this’, but as in ‘following this line of conversation further is going to end up with you pissed off for reasons you can’t articulate and me pissed off for reasons I understand very fucking well, and nothing will actually change’. So, okay.”
He didn’t bring it up again that night.
He didn’t bring it up again that week.
WIth the exception of a few passive-aggressive journal articles left on the coffee table — a copy of JAMA, conveniently turned to an article assessing a new approach to degloving injuries in the legs; a case study from a neurology journal neither of them subscribed to about diffuse axonal injuries — Jack kept his word.
Weeks passed. Winter slipped sluggishly into the kind of miserable wet spring that people of a poetic bent could deceive themselves and say was moody, claim that they could smell the hint of green in the petrichor indicating the season was changing.
Robby had been one of those people, once. He wasn’t sure where that person went.
He’d been excited about his job, once. It was hard to remember why, but he had been. He sat in the kitchen on a rainy morning in March, feeling every minute of his years, the cold and the damp seeping in and reminding him of every poor ergonomic choice he had ever made.
It had been a long week. Nothing in particular had gone wrong — which was annoying as hell, if Robby was being honest, because it meant he couldn’t point to something outside of himself and say that it, objectively, was the problem, the ED had been the usual flood of flu and covid and RSV and traumas and chronic conditions they couldn’t afford to see a PCP about and people dodging the wet and cold on the city streets with vague complaints. Standard. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
He was going to be late. He knew he was. He couldn’t make himself stand up.
The clock on the stove slipped forward. Five thirty. Six.
Robby stared at his coffee.
“Why are you still here?”
Robby glanced up from his coffee to see Jack leaning in the kitchen doorway.
“Why are you awake?”
“Damp’s pissing me off.”
“You mean it’s pissing off your joints.”
“Technically, my joints are a part of me. Much as I hate to admit it.”
“You taken anything?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. “I will in a minute. You’re going to be late, you know.”
“I’m leaving,” Robby said. He didn’t move.
“In that case, you’re doing a very convincing impression of a man who isn’t leaving. You were born for the stage, clearly.”
Robby laughed. Probably. He felt like he did.
“I don’t want to,” he said, finally. “I know I have to. I know it matters. I know I like my job. I know it’s important. I’m going to go in. But what I actually want to do is go back to bed. Catch up on a forty-year sleep debt.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“You know the answer to that question.”
“I was being polite, you should try it sometime. Let me rephrase myself: you didn’t sleep.”
“I got some,” Robby said. “My Apple Watch is being very passive-aggressive about it. I didn’t ask it to give me a sleep score. I don’t need to get graded on my REM cycles by Big Tech.”
“You could call out,” Jack said.
Robby looked at him, then, really looked at him. He was pleasantly sleep-rumpled; wearing one of Robby’s hoodies and a pair of flannel pyjama bottoms, his cheeks stubbled, a faint crease on the side of his face from the seam of the pillowcase. His mouth was tense, just a little, just at the sides, the only visible sign of the pain Robby knew he was experiencing, but his eyes were openly worried, sharp, assessing, in a way Jack rarely directed at him.
“I thought about it,” Robby said. “Then I remembered that someone has to run the emergency department, and my colleagues would justifiably want my head on a pike if I called out with an hour’s notice.”
Robby pushed himself up from the kitchen table, the scarred wooden surface catching the light, stretching his neck and shoulders as he did so, the pops and crackles of his joints loud in the silence of the early morning.
“I should get going,” Robby said, finally. He picked up his backpack from the counter, grabbed his jacket from the boathook, and quickly opened the door before he could talk himself out of it.
“Michael,” Jack said sharply. “Where’s your fucking helmet?”
Robby stopped in his tracks, one foot over the threshold.
“Shit,” Robby said, honestly. “I almost forgot.”
“That’s not the kind of thing you’re allowed to forget.”
“Right,” Robby said. “I know. I got it. Good catch. I’d have noticed when I got downstairs.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Okay. Just — have a good shift, alright? I’ll see you tonight.”
Robby nodded, grabbed his helmet from its spot in the entryway, and walked out the door.
That night, Robby slept.
The leaded glass was back, thick, institutional, shattered little at the edges in a way which would compromise the whole structure, and through it he saw a room, small and dark and cramped, the faint-sweet smell of sickness and antiseptic and a woman whose face Robby told himself he still remembered was lying in a bed, blankets layered over a thin frame, and before his eyes she shrank and shrank until there was nothing left and next to her in a heavy armchair, pocked with cigarette burns on the edges of the arms, sat Robby, or a man who was so like him he was indistinguishable through the glass, Robby with a thick seventies moustache and a threadbare button-down shirt, staring at the woman as she shrank away and there was a baby crying from beyond the glass but nobody was doing anything about it and he tried to open his mouth to speak but when he did nothing came out and the baby was crying and the man was just watching and the monitor was beeping even though there hadn't been one, not then, not really, but the rhythm was off, the beeping erratic, and then the final high-pitched whine and it was 1979 and 2020 and 2024 all at once, and he was alone, and the glass was still there, and he called out and the man turned to him but his face was turning blue, cyanotic, some distant part of him supplied, and if he could get past the glass he knew he’d see ligature marks but he couldn’t, he was trapped, and people were calling for him in languages he’d once known and —
He woke up.
He didn’t move. The glass was still there, giving the shadows of the room an odd, glazed effect, and his blood was rushing through his ears, and —
“Robby?”
Robby blinked.
“You good?” Jack’s voice was thick with sleep, a little hoarse, and Robby clung to it like a talisman, a guiding light, its sodium flare hazy through the leaded glass.
Robby swallowed.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. Jack was pushing himself up on his elbows, clumsily reaching for the light, and Robby waved him off. “Go back to sleep. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Robby said. “Sorry if I woke you. I didn’t say anything, did I?”
“No,” Jack said.
“Good,” Robby said. “Sorry. Weird dream. Think I ate too much cheese before bed.”
“Alright,” Jack said, “Go back to sleep.”
“I will,” Robby said. It didn’t take long for Jack to fall back to sleep. It never did.
Robby didn’t go back to sleep.
Robby lay back in the darkened room, listening to Jack’s rhythmic breathing, turning the dream over in his head, remembering the feeling, the horror, the knowledge in his bones that the baby was hungry and nobody was getting up to feed her and the formula tin was nearly empty and —
He should have felt the horror. The fear. In the dream, he had.
He didn’t feel it anymore.
He turned the scene over in his mind, holding its sharpest edges tightly, looking for the cut, the slice, the echo of pain.
He didn’t feel anything.
When dawn broke, he pushed himself out of bed and went to the kitchen to make coffee.
“Did you sleep at all?”
Robby looked up from the crossword to see Jack looking at him, those warm brown eyes sharp and careful, like he was a trauma with a hidden bleed, like there was a mnemonic device for remembering all the points of clinical interest locked behind his skull.
“A bit,” Robby said. “Couple of hours.”
“That’s not sustainable,” Jack said flatly. “You know it isn’t.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Robby said, pulling on a tone of levity like an ill-fitting coat, scratchy at the seams and collar.
Jack didn’t laugh.
“That was a joke,” Robby said.
Weeks passed.
Spring began to give way to early summer.
Robby wasn’t sleeping.
Jack noticed. Of course he did.
“You should talk to someone,” Jack said over dinner on an early June evening.
“Hi honey, how was your day? Was work alright?” Robby said mockingly. “Jesus, at least give me the dignity of small talk before you start trying to administer the PCL-5 at the dinner table.”
“If I started talking like that, you’d be checking me for signs of a brain tumour, and you’d be correct to do so.”
“Point.”
“You should still talk to someone. I’m not really sure what the objection is. But I’m worried about you.”
“You don’t need to be,” Robby said. “I’m fine. The winter was just messing with me a little. I’m good. Sun’s out, I’m back to baseline.”
“You’re a shitty liar,” Jack said. “I ever tell you that?”
“Every time I do it,” Robby said.
He took a bite of pasta. It was good pasta. Fine. His mouth was dry for some reason. The pasta thicker than he remembered. Swallowed. Stabbed another piece with his fork deliberately, the instructions for being a normal human being, carefully implemented in a stepwise pattern, like eating dinner was an innovative new procedure being spoken about at a conference by an MD/PhD with teeth that cost more than Robby’s first car.
“I put in for some time off,” Robby said, abruptly. He’d meant to mention it. He’d forgotten to mention it.
“Oh?” Jack looked genuinely surprised, even pleased, his assessing squint replaced by an oddly proud warmth. “That’s great, man. How long?”
“Three months.”
Jack stared at him.
“Three months?”
“Yeah,” Robby said. “You’ve been saying I should. I decided maybe you were on to something. Figured I’d take some time, catch up on some sleep. Do some travelling.”
Jack blinked. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“Travelling where, exactly?”
“Maybe a road trip,” Robby said. “I’ve been looking at options. Maybe Canada.”
“Maybe Canada?”
“Yeah,” Robby said. “I haven’t really been. It’s right there.”
“Were you planning on telling me this?”
“I’m telling you now,” Robby said.
“You realize that most people would mention this to their partner before they put in the leave request, right?”
“I forgot,” Robby said. “I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately.”
“I noticed,” Jack said. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
Robby continued like he hadn’t spoken. “I thought I’d take the motorcycle. Go out into nature. Get my head on right.”
Jack blinked. “You hate nature. I believe the last time I attempted to get you to engage in nature, you informed me that you’d “maxed out” on natural exposure during MSF, and also, repeatedly, that ‘Jews don’t camp’.”
“I don’t think I said that.”
“You definitely did,” Jack said. “I remember it very distinctly, because I was then in the profoundly awkward position of having to decide if that was a true statement about your culture, or if it was something an elderly Robinavitch family member once said to you and you have been repeating it as gospel for the last forty-odd years.”
“Very few things I say are gospel,” Robby said. “That’s your people’s department.”
“You’re hilarious,” Jack said, “And you have not successfully distracted me, by the way. I return to my earlier point — this is the kind of thing that people tell their partners.”
Robby took another bite of pasta. Chewed. Swallowed.
“Are you planning on going alone?” Jack said, finally.
“You can come if you want,” Robby said. “Didn’t seem like your cup of tea. And I think it might be good for me to spend some time in nature. Be alone with my thoughts for a bit.”
“Yeah, that’s my concern,” Jack said bluntly.
Robby blinked.
“I’m sorry?” Robby kept his tone level, but he could feel the irritation rising in his chest, the clawing sensation, pulling and hooking the worst possible things he could say, the most hurtful, through the sticky trails of his cerebellum, forming behind his lips, and for once, he was grateful for the glass, for the distance, for the sheer effort it took to push through it, because he didn’t actually want to hurt Jack, didn’t want to say those things, he just didn’t want to fucking talk about this, and he couldn’t —
The words existed, he knew. The words that would convince Jack that this was a normal thing for Robby to do. Healthy. Self-care, even. That he didn’t need to worry. That nobody needed to worry.
Jack, oblivious to the distant war in Robby’s mind, continued.
“You’re not yourself,” he said, finally. “Haven’t been for a while. You think you’re hiding it. You aren’t. And you don’t do well on your own.”
“I was on my own for a long time before I met you,” Robby said. “I’m a grown man, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’re a grown man who hasn’t completed two consecutive REM cycles in God knows how long. You haven’t been yourself. And now you’re telling me that, without talking about it at all, you decided to take three months off, and spend some or all of it by yourself, in another country, likely outside of the range of adequate cell phone coverage. You see why that’s worrying?”
“It shouldn’t be,” Robby said. “I just — I need to not be findable, for a bit. I need to not be asked questions. I need to not be responsible for anyone’s life or education or future. That’s all.”
Jack stared at him for a long moment, his own pasta long forgotten.
“Fuck, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,” Jack said. “It’s not productive. I know that. But you — I need you to promise me something. Swear to me that this isn’t an elaborate scheme to kill yourself. Or to let yourself die, in a way which is sufficiently ambiguous that your loved ones can tell ourselves it was an accident. Promise me that. Please.”
Robby stared back at him.
“Fuck, you been sitting on that one for a while, Jack?”
“I’m not joking, Michael. Please.”
“I promise I’m not going to kill myself.”
Jack nodded, swallowed, once, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
He should say something comforting. Robby knew he should say something comforting.
“Okay,” Jack said. “If that's all I'm getting, then - okay. When does your leave start?”
“First week of July,” Robby said. “I’ll work the Fourth, then I’m done.”
“For a while,” Jack said. “Done work for a while.”
“Of course,” Robby said, feeling the hot irritation flash again. “What else would I mean? Good god, does your therapist know you’ve apparently got me on suicide watch?”
Jack just looked at him, then said, his voice a little raspier than usual. “You’re not on suicide watch. But you’re not allowed to go anywhere I can’t follow. We made a deal.”
“Right,” Robby said, feeling the fight drain out of him all of a sudden, leaving nothing in its wake but trails of dust. “I know.”
He took another bite of his pasta.
The morning of the Fourth dawned slowly.
Robby didn’t sleep well the night before. It felt like every shift he took, every day closer he got to his sabbatical, things grated harder, sounds pinging the edges of his skull instead of bouncing off of them, alarms and questions and smells and sounds and —
It was his last shift.
He took a long shower, trying to rid himself of the vague scent of antiseptic and sick-sweetness that hovered at the edges of his nostrils at the end of long nights.
By the time he was getting dressed, Jack stirred.
“Looking forward to your last shift before your break?”
“I should have picked the third as my last day,” Robby said dryly. “Avoided the plethora of eye and finger trauma waiting for me on this fine morning. Alcohol poisoning. Someone getting stabbed at a family barbecue. The classics. Truly, the patient population on the Fourth highlights what America’s all about.”
“Can’t relate,” Jack said, grinning a little. “Got a hot date with noise-cancelling headphones, blackout curtains, and klonopin.”
Robby snorted. “Enjoy your bunker, man.”
He paused for a moment, then said, “Call me if you need to.”
“I will,” Jack said.
He wouldn’t. They both knew that. But the ritual of asking mattered.
Robby nodded, straightened, and walked out of their bedroom. The dim pre-dawn light cast shadows over the kitchen, and the soft quiet was almost deafening, pressing down, taunting him with the shrill sound of alarms and questions and needs and wants and another day as the last place anyone wanted to be and the last place for anyone to go before disappearing through the canyon-sized cracks in the system all together and the smell of antiseptic and the tang of illness and —
Robby stopped. Looked down, where his hand was pressed against the edge of the counter in a death grip, his knuckles white, and he pried his hand away finger by finger, piece by piece, and took a breath. Grabbed his keys. His bag. His thermos of coffee. Pulled on the form of Dr. Robby piece by piece until the seams lined up.
He walked out the door, leaving his helmet behind.